Middle of the Road

Middle of the Road is the result of a collaboration with the
dancer and choreographer,
Clay Taliaferro,
a member of the dance faculty at Duke University. Our
collaboration began at the instigation of Jairo Moreno, who wanted
to present a colloquium on the relationship between music and gesture.
Jairo suggested that Clay and I develop a piece that would serve as
a vehicle for this presentation. Of course, the piece itself soon became
the focal point for our work. We took the idea of collaboration seriously:
Clay and I met every week for a period of three months, and I regularly
attended rehearsals of the work in progress. Collaborating in this way
(as opposed to working in isolation) changed the way I wrote music for the
soundtrack.

We began with a song I wrote in 1989, a piece Clay had long been interested
in setting to choreography. The text of the song is a poem by
Carlos Drummond de Andrade in a translation by Elizabeth Bishop called
"In the Middle of the Road." The poem is simplicity itself, almost wilfully
devoid of content, perhaps even mocking the idea of poetic content.
Nonetheless, I chose to believe that the poem recounts a life-changing
experience:

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

In addition to this text, Clay brought in a beautiful poem by Rilke, the
ninth "Duino Elegy." The urgent rhetoric of this poem could
not be more distant from the simplicity of Drummond de Andrade's poem.
Clay's reading of the Rilke is intensely musical, with its unrehearsed
repetitions and falterings combined with a quiet, almost whispered tone
of voice. His reading is at once intimate and dignified.

Taking the texts and song as a point of departure, I went to
work collecting other sounds: snapping sticks, clanking pot lids,
spinning coins on a tabletop, breathing, ambient sounds of a rainy day
outside my house, and highway traffic at rush hour. Later on I recorded
melodies and sustained notes performed by my colleagues,
Eric Pritchard (violin)
and Susan Dunn (soprano). Working on my Macintosh with Csound, SoundHack,
some home-made software, and a digital mixing environment, I started
putting the piece together.

Composing is usually a solitary activity, and what's more, I had become
accustomed to keeping my projects to myself until they were ready to be
performed. No sneak previews for my friends and colleagues! The process
of composing "Middle of the Road" was a refreshing change of pace.
Clay choreographed the music as soon as I gave it to him, and I regularly
attended rehearsals with the dancers, taking notes as I watched the piece
take shape. Music I had completed earlier in the day would be
set to choreography that night. On occasion it would be abundantly clear to
me that a certain musical passage resisted being set to dance, and so I would
go home and try again. In this way, the soundtrack was truly shaped by the
process of setting it to dance.

I have been calling the piece a "soundtrack" because I still can't imagine
it as a self-sufficient piece of music. In part this is because of the
extended passages of spoken text, which are situated in particular ambient
environments rather than set to music. Another factor is the
heterogeneous nature of the composition, which includes singing and playing
as well as less conventional textures characterized by the non-musical
sound sources I listed above. One of the real pleasures of working with
Clay was
that he responded to music; he was generally not interested in what
I was doing on the Mac, and, if anything, he tended to dislike
anything that sounded like "computer music."
This proved to be the perfect antidote to
keep me from succumbing to some of the clichés of the medium,
particularly the tendency to go in for surreal sound effects.
Instead, I tried to construct a continuity in which musical passages
naturally led to spoken text and vice versa. I hoped that the musical
passages would provide an expressive focus for the ideas presented in the
texted passages. The technology remains largely transparent.

"Middle of the Road" received its premiere performances on December 1-2,
2000 in Reynolds Theater at Duke University.